11th Florida Governor. Marcellus Stearns received his place in American history, as the acting Governor of the State of Florida from March 18, 1874 to January 2, 1877. At first, he was a candidate for governor, receiving numerous votes at the Republican convention, but he withdrew his candidacy, backing Ossian B. Hart and was eventually elected as Lieutenant Governor. Upon Hart's death, with only fourteen months into his governorship, Lt. Governor Stearns assumed the duties of governor. At age 34, he is the youngest governor of Florida as of 2021. Born one of six sons of a farmer, he taught school to pay for his college tuition. During the American Civil War, he left Colby College in Waterville, Maine to join the Union Army in November of 1861. He served in the 12th Maine Infantry, E Company at the rank of a private, but was quickly promoted to Second Lieutenant by June of 1862. He was sent to New Orleans and he found himself Captain of the "USS Hortense," a schooner responsible for patrolling Lake Pontchartrain. He had started his law studies after joining the military. In September of 1864 his right arm was amputated at the shoulder after receiving a musket shot in his right humerus at the Third Battle of Winchester near Opequon Creek in Virginia. He received the wound in battle when he took initiative and led the troops in a series of charges after several superior officers were wounded. He was promoted to the rank of Major. Upon recuperating, he was assigned light duty in the 20th Regiment Veterans Reserve Corps. After a short assignment in West Virginia, he was sent to be the Director of the Freeman Bureau in Quincy, Florida, where he remained after his discharge in January of 1869. After the war, all former Confederate officers and elected officials of the Democratic Party were disfranchised as part of the Reconstruction Era, thus the Republicans easily gained control of the government. As a Republican, he entered Florida politics. Finishing his law studies, he passed the Florida bar examination. Stearns was elected an Assemblyman from Gadsden County in 1868 and served as the United States Surveyor General for Florida. His detailed annual reports and survey maps on the Everglades and other places can be found in the Florida archives. He was a member of both the 1868 Florida Constitutional Convention and the Florida House of Representatives from 1868 through 1872, serving, at the age of 29, as speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1869 session. He was elected lieutenant governor in 1872, but Hart never recouped from the stress of his campaign, often leaving tasks for him as acting governor. He given the duties of governor upon Hart's death in 1874. While he was in office, Florida's budget was balanced, and tourists first began to flock to the state. He openly supported the former slaves' civil rights, which included voting. He supported a strong fiscal policy which helped bring outside investment to the State. He reformed the prison system, built asylums for the insane, and schools for the deaf and blind. He made sure a free education was available to all regardless of race. He attempted to have Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs resign his post as Superintendent of Public Instruction, but was unsuccessful. The very popular Gibbs was the first and only Black Secretary of State and Superintendent of Public Instruction of Florida, serving from 1868 to 1873. Racial tensions ran high through the state, and more than once, he had threats made on his life. Stearns ran for re-election in 1876, but was defeated by Democrat George Drew by 195 votes out of nearly 50,000 cast. He was able to secure Florida's four electoral votes for Republican Presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, which enabled Hayes to become the President of the United States by a single electoral vote. In 1877, he was appointed United States commissioner at Hot Springs Reservation in Arkansas, serving until 1880. This was Federal land which had been set aside by United States President Andrew Jackson in 1832 but never developed. On a vacation to Maine, he met a distant cousin, Ellen Austin Walker, and the couple were married in 1878 and after 1880, returned to Florida, where he practiced law in Quincy along with surveying assignments for the Department of the Interior. In 1883, he and his wife toured Europe. In 1887, the couple relocated from Florida to Atlantic, Iowa where he served as the President of the Atlantic National Bank. Three years later, he had a stroke with left-sided weakness, thus retiring from banking as his health continued to decline. This was a serious complication with his right arm being amputated during the war. After a final trip to Maine, he was planning to return to Florida but died suddenly at his in-laws' home in New York. He was buried in his family's plot in Maine, yet his wife was buried alongside her second husband Jordan Stabler in Maryland. After he left the office in 1877, there was no Republican Governor of Florida until Claude Kirk in 1967.